Engineering Commons^™

Mass Reduction Patterning Of Silicon-On-Oxide–Based Micromirrors, Harris J. Hall, Andrew Green, Sarah Dooley, Jason D. Schmidt, Lavern A. Starman, Derrick Langley, Ronald A. Coutu Jr.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

It has long been recognized in the design of micromirror-based optical systems that balancing static flatness of the mirror surface through structural design with the system’s mechanical dynamic response is challenging. Although a variety of mass reduction approaches have been presented in the literature to address this performance trade, there has been little quantifiable comparison reported. In this work, different mass reduction approaches, some unique to the work, are quantifiably compared with solid plate thinning in both curvature and mass using commercial finite element simulation of a specific square silicon-on-insulator–based micromirror geometry. Other important considerations for micromirror surfaces, including surface …

Distributed All-Ip Mobility Management Architecture Supported By The Ndn Overlay, Zhiwei Yan, Guanggang Geng, Sherali Zeadally, Yong-Jin Park

Information Science Faculty Publications

Two of the most promising candidate solutions for realizing the next-generation all-IP mobile networks are Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), which is the host-based and global mobility supporting protocol, and Proxy MIPv6 (PMIPv6), which is the network-based and localized mobility supporting protocol. However, the unprecedented growth of mobile Internet traffic has resulted in the development of distributed mobility management (DMM) architecture by the Internet engineering task force DMM working group. The extension of the basic MIPv6 and PMIPv6 to support their distributed and scalable deployment in the future is one of the major goals of the DMM working group. We propose an …

Investigating The Impact Of Unsupervised Feature-Extraction From Multi-Wavelength Image Data For Photometric Classification Of Stars, Galaxies And Qsos, Annika Lindh

Conference papers

Accurate classification of astronomical objects currently relies on spectroscopic data. Acquiring this data is time-consuming and expensive compared to photometric data. Hence, improving the accuracy of photometric classification could lead to far better coverage and faster classification pipelines. This paper investigates the benefit of using unsupervised feature-extraction from multi-wavelength image data for photometric classification of stars, galaxies and QSOs. An unsupervised Deep Belief Network is used, giving the model a higher level of interpretability thanks to its generative nature and layer-wise training. A Random Forest classifier is used to measure the contribution of the novel features compared to a set …

Investigation Of Polymer–Plasticizer Blends As Sh-Saw Sensor Coatings For Detection Of Benzene In Water With High Sensitivity And Long-Term Stability, Pintu Adhikari, Laura Jeanne Alderson, Florian Bender, Antonio J. Ricco, Fabien Josse

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

We report the first-ever direct detection of benzene in water at concentrations below 100 ppb (parts per billion) using acoustic wave (specifically, shear-horizontal surface acoustic wave, SH-SAW) sensors with plasticized polymer coatings. Two polymers and two plasticizers were studied as materials for sensor coatings. For each polymer–plasticizer combination, the influence of the mixing ratio of the blend on the sensitivity to benzene was measured and compared to commercially available polymers that were used for BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene) detection in previous work. After optimizing the coating parameters, the highest sensitivity and lowest detection limit for benzene were found …

Multipath And Rate Stability, Junjie Liu, Roch A. Guérin

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Originally Published In Proc. IEEE Globecom Conference - CQRM: Communication QoS, Reliability & Modeling Symposium

Open Scholarly Publishing Plugin, Barry Bailey

Sabbatical Projects

Presentation reflecting author's sabbatical project, which reviewed the need for and developed a plugin to allow institutions to convert WordPress into an institutional repository.

A Multi-Value Sequence Generated By Power Residue Symbol And Trace Function Over Odd Characteristic Field, Yasuyuki Nogami, Satoshi Uehara, Kazuyoshi Tsuchiya, Nasima Begum, Hiroto Ino, Robert Morelos-Zaragoza

Faculty Publications

This paper proposes a new multi-value sequence generated by utilizing primitive element, trace, and power residue symbol over odd characteristic finite field. In detail, let p and k be an odd prime number as the characteristic and a prime factor of p-1, respectively. Our proposal generates k-value sequence T={ti | ti=fk(Tr(ωi)+A)}, where ω is a primitive element in the extension field $\F{p}{m}$, Tr(⋅) is the trace function that maps $\F{p}{m} \rightarrow \f{p}$, A is a non-zero scalar in the prime field $\f{p}$, and fk(⋅) is a certain mapping function based on k-th power residue symbol. Thus, the proposed sequence has …

A New System For Human Microrna Functional Evaluation And Network, Jiachun Han

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

MicroRNAs are functionally important endogenous non-coding RNAs that silence host genes in animal and plant via destabilizing the mRNAs or preventing the translation. Given the far-reaching implication of microRNA regulation in human health, novel bioinformatics tools are desired to facilitate the mechanistic understanding of microRNA mediated gene regulation, their roles in biological processes, and the functional relevance among microRNAs. However, most state-of-the-art computational methods still focus on the functional study of microRNA targets and there is no e ective strategy to infer the functional similarity among microRNAs. In this study, we developed a new method to quantitatively measure the functional …

The Effect Of Frequency Resolution On Intelligibility Sentence And Its Relevance To Cochlear Implant Design, Seth H. Roy

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this study is to understand how electrical stimulation (as opposed to acoustical stimulation) of the auditory nerve is used in cochlear implants. Speech is a complex signal that changes rapidly in time and frequency domains. Since phonemes (the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes words) depend on nuanced differences in frequency patterns, it would be expected that a signal with drastically reduced frequency information would be of limited value for conveying speech. Such a frequency-poor signal is the object to be investigated in the present work. It is also the basis of the way speech is represented …

Design Of A Flexible Control Platform And Miniature In Vivo Robots For Laparo-Endoscopic Single-Site Surgeries, Lou P. Cubrich

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Minimally-invasive laparoscopic procedures have proven efficacy for a wide range of surgical procedures as well as benefits such as reducing scarring, infection, recovery time, and post-operative pain. While the procedures have many advantages, there are significant shortcomings such as limited instrument motion and reduced dexterity. In recent years, robotic surgical technology has overcome some of these limitations and has become an effective tool for many types of surgeries. These robotic platforms typically have an increased workspace, greater dexterity, improved ergonomics, and finer control than traditional laparoscopic methods. This thesis presents the designs of both a four degree-of-freedom (DOF) and 5-DOF …

On Path Consistency For Binary Constraint Satisfaction Problems, Christopher G. Reeson

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) provide a flexible and powerful framework for modeling and solving many decision problems of practical importance. Consistency properties and the algorithms for enforcing them on a problem instance are at the heart of Constraint Processing and best distinguish this area from other areas concerned with the same combinatorial problems. In this thesis, we study path consistency (PC) and investigate several algorithms for enforcing it on binary finite CSPs. We also study algorithms for enforcing consistency properties that are related to PC but are stronger or weaker than PC.

We identify and correct errors in the literature …

Optimization Of Irrigation Decision In Cornsoywater, Dharmic Payyala

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A crop simulation model is used to estimate crop production as a function of weather conditions, soil parameters, and plant related inputs. These crop simulation models are extensively used by farmers, corporations and policy makers for agronomical planning and decision making. CornSoyWater is one such application which provides irrigation recommendation for soy and corn farmers using hybrid maize and soy sim models. As this is a simulation technology, the accuracy of results depends on the quality of data provided to it. One such important input parameter is weather data. CornSoyWater simulates field and crop conditions by retrieving the updated weather …

Characterization Of Molecular Communication Based On Cell Metabolism Through Mutual Information And Flux Balance Analysis, Zahmeeth Sayed Sakkaff

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Synthetic biology is providing novel tools to engineer cells and access the basis of their molecular information processing, including their communication channels based on chemical reactions and molecule exchange. Molecular communication is a discipline in communication engineering that studies these types of communications and ways to exploit them for novel purposes, such as the development of ubiquitous and heterogeneous communication networks to interconnect biological cells with nano and biotechnology-enabled devices, i.e., the Internet of Bio-Nano Things. One major problem in realizing these goals stands in the development of reliable techniques to control the engineered cells and their behavior from the …

Semeo: A Semantic Equivalence Analysis Framework For Obfuscated Android Applications, Zhen Hu

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Software repackaging is a common approach for creating malware. In this approach, malware authors inject malicious payloads into legitimate applications; then, to ren- der security analysis more difficult, they obfuscate most or all of the code. This forces analysts to spend a large amount of effort filtering out benign obfuscated methods in order to locate potentially malicious methods for further analysis. If an effective mechanism for filtering out benign obfuscated methods were available, the number of methods that must be analyzed could be reduced, allowing analysts to be more productive. In this thesis, we introduce SEMEO, a highly effective and …

Autonomous Uavs For Near Earth Environmental Sensing, David J. Anthony

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing an increasing role in large scale environmental monitoring. Small UAVs are increasingly used to monitor agricultural fields, infrastructure projects, and disaster areas. The combination of their sensors, ease of use, and portability make them an ideal tool for collecting information on demand about geographic regions. These small UAVs do have several significant limitations. The UAVs have very limited autonomy and fly pre-determined flight paths far above the underlying terrain, limiting the spatial resolution of the collected data. Current battery technology severely limits their flight times, which in turn limits the temporal resolution of the …

Testing The Independence Hypothesis Of Accepted Mutations For Pairs Of Adjacent Amino Acids In Protein Sequences, Jyotsna Ramanan

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Evolutionary studies usually assume that the genetic mutations are independent of each other. However, that does not imply that the observed mutations are independent of each other because it is possible that when a nucleotide is mutated, then it may be biologically beneficial if an adjacent nucleotide mutates too.

With a number of decoded genes currently available in various genome libraries and online databases, it is now possible to have a large-scale computer-based study to test whether the independence assumption holds for pairs of adjacent amino acids. Hence the independence question also arises for pairs of adjacent amino acids within …

Power Management In Heterogeneous Mapreduce Cluster, Rojee Sunuwar

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The growing expenses of power in data centers as compared to the operation costs has been a concern for the past several decades. It has been predicted that without an intervention, the energy cost will soon outgrow the infrastructure and operation cost. Therefore, it is of great importance to make data center clusters more energy efficient which is critical for avoiding system overheating and failures. In addition, energy inefficiency causes not only the loss of capital but also environmental pollution. Various Power Management(PM) strategies have been developed over the years to make system more energy efficient and to counteract the …

Rectilinear Steiner Tree Construction, Zhiliu Zhang

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The Minimum Rectilinear Steiner Tree (MRST) problem is to find the minimal spanning tree of a set of points (also called terminals) in the plane that interconnects all the terminals and some extra points (called Steiner points) introduced by intermediate junctions, and in which edge lengths are measured in the L1 (Manhattan) metric. This is one of the oldest optimization problems in mathematics that has been extensively studied and has been proven to be NP-complete, thus efficient approximation heuristics are more applicable than exact algorithms.

In this thesis, we present a new heuristic to construct rectilinear Steiner trees (RSTs) with …

Towards Building A Review Recommendation System That Trains Novices By Leveraging The Actions Of Experts, Shilpa Khanal

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Online reviews increase consumer visits, increase the time spent on the website, and create a sense of community among the frequent shoppers. Because of the importance of online reviews, online retailers such as Amazon.com and eOpinions provide detailed guidelines for writing reviews. However, though these guidelines provide instructions on how to write reviews, reviewers are not provided instructions for writing product-specific reviews. As a result, poorly-written reviews are abound and a customer may need to scroll through a large number of reviews, which could be up to 6000 pixels down from the top of the page, in order to find …

Determination Of Plant Architecture And Component Phenotyping Based On Time-Lapse Image Analysis, Srinidhi Bashyam

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Plant breeding and the development of new food production depend on accurate measurement of different phenotypes (observable physical traits) of a plant. The plant phenotypes play a very important role in the agronomic production. The successful computation of plant phenotypes largely depends on the determination of the architecture of the plant, i.e., the arrangement of its parts (leaves, stems, flowers, etc.) relative to each other, and how the size, shape, and positions of those parts change over time. Researchers and breeders extract valuable information from these types of data to make an informed decision on which individuals to advance to …

Finding Dna Motifs: A Probabilistic Suffix Tree Approach, Abhishek Majumdar

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

We address the problem of de novo motif identification. That is, given a set of DNA sequences we try to identify motifs in the dataset without having any prior knowledge about existence of any motifs in the dataset. We propose a method based on Probabilistic Suffix Trees (PSTs) to identify fixed-length motifs from a given set of DNA sequences. Our experiments reveal that our approach successfully discovers true motifs. We compared our method with the popular MEME algorithm, and observed that it detects a larger number of correct and statistically significant motifs than MEME. Our method is highly efficient as …

Identity-Based Schemes For A Secured Big Data And Cloud Ict Framework In Smart Grid System, Feng Ye, Yi Qian, Rose Qingyang Hu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Smart grid is an intelligent cyber physical system (CPS). The CPS generates a massive amount of data for efficient grid operation. In this paper, a big data-driven, cloud-based information and communication technology (ICT) framework for smart grid CPS is proposed. The proposed ICT framework deploys hybrid cloud servers to enhance scalability and reliability of smart grid communication infrastructure. Because the data in the ICT framework contains much privacy of customers and important data for automated controlling, the security of data transmission must be ensured. In order to secure the communications over the Internet in the system, identity-based schemes are proposed …

Identity‐Based Schemes For A Secured Big Data And Cloud Ict Framework In Smart Grid System, Feng Ye, Yi Qian, Rose Qingyang Hu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Smart grid is an intelligent cyber physical system (CPS). The CPS generates a massive amount of data for efficient grid operation. In this paper, a big data‐driven, cloud‐based information and communication technology (ICT) framework for smart grid CPS is proposed. The proposed ICT framework deploys hybrid cloud servers to enhance scalability and reliability of smart grid communication infrastructure. Because the data in the ICT framework contains much privacy of customers and important data for automated controlling, the security of data transmission must be ensured. In order to secure the communications over the Internet in the system, identity‐based schemes are proposed …

Hashtag Recommendation With Topical Attention-Based Lstm, Yang Li, Ting Liu, Jing Jiang, Liang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogging services allow users to create hashtags to categorize their posts. In recent years,the task of recommending hashtags for microblogs has been given increasing attention. However,most of existing methods depend on hand-crafted features. Motivated by the successful use oflong short-term memory (LSTM) for many natural language processing tasks, in this paper, weadopt LSTM to learn the representation of a microblog post. Observing that hashtags indicatethe primary topics of microblog posts, we propose a novel attention-based LSTM model whichincorporates topic modeling into the LSTM architecture through an attention mechanism. Weevaluate our model using a large real-world dataset. Experimental results show that …

From Footprint To Evidence: An Exploratory Study Of Mining Social Data For Credit Scoring, Guangming Guo, Feida Zhu, Enhong Chen, Qi Liu, Le Wu, Chu Guan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the booming popularity of online social networks like Twitter and Weibo, online user footprints are accumulating rapidly on the social web. Simultaneously, the question of how to leverage the large-scale user-generated social media data for personal credit scoring comes into the sight of both researchers and practitioners. It has also become a topic of great importance and growing interest in the P2P lending industry. However, compared with traditional financial data, heterogeneous social data presents both opportunities and challenges for personal credit scoring. In this article, we seek a deep understanding of how to learn users’ credit labels from social …

Unsupervised Feature Selection For Outlier Detection By Modelling Hierarchical Value-Feature Couplings, Guansong Pang, Longbing Cao, Ling Chen, Huan Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Proper feature selection for unsupervised outlier detection can improve detection performance but is very challenging due to complex feature interactions, the mixture of relevant features with noisy/redundant features in imbalanced data, and the unavailability of class labels. Little work has been done on this challenge. This paper proposes a novel Coupled Unsupervised Feature Selection framework (CUFS for short) to filter out noisy or redundant features for subsequent outlier detection in categorical data. CUFS quantifies the outlierness (or relevance) of features by learning and integrating both the feature value couplings and feature couplings. Such value-to-feature couplings capture intrinsic data characteristics and …

Overview Of Lte Spectrum Sharing Technologies, Yun Ye, Dalei Wu, Zhihui Shu, Yi Qian

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Long-Term Evolution (LTE) communication systems feature advanced frequency reuse and interference coordination techniques providing faster and more secured mobile services. However, the network capacity in licensed spectrum is still behind market demands. Dynamic spectrum access or spectrum sharing in other frequently vacant or unlicensed frequency bands is considered an effective means to boost system throughput. Different from operations in licensed spectrum with exclusive access, LTE deployment needs to take into account the distinct regulations on channel access to each shared frequency band, in order to avoid interference to incumbent users, and to maintain fair play with peer operators in heterogeneous …

On The Origin Of Synthetic Life: Attribution Of Output To A Particular Algorithm, Roman V. Yampolskiy

Faculty Scholarship

With unprecedented advances in genetic engineering we are starting to see progressively more original examples of synthetic life. As such organisms become more common it is desirable to gain an ability to distinguish between natural and artificial life forms. In this paper, we address this challenge as a generalized version of Darwin's original problem, which he so brilliantly described in On the Origin of Species. After formalizing the problem of determining the samples' origin, we demonstrate that the problem is in fact unsolvable. In the general case, if computational resources of considered originator algorithms have not been limited and priors …

Towards Learning And Verifying Invariants Of Cyber-Physical Systems By Code Mutation, Yuqi Chen, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS), which integrate algorithmic control with physical processes, often consist of physically distributed components communicating over a network. A malfunctioning or compromised component in such a CPS can lead to costly consequences, especially in the context of public infrastructure. In this short paper, we argue for the importance of constructing invariants (or models) of the physical behaviour exhibited by CPS, motivated by their applications to the control, monitoring, and attestation of components. To achieve this despite the inherent complexity of CPS, we propose a new technique for learning invariants that combines machine learning with ideas from mutation testing. …

Towards Concolic Testing For Hybrid Systems, Pingfan Kong, Yi Li, Xiaohong Chen, Jun Sun, Meng Sun, Jingyi Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hybrid systems exhibit both continuous and discrete behavior. Analyzing hybrid systems is known to be hard. Inspired by the idea of concolic testing (of programs), we investigate whether we can combine random sampling and symbolic execution in order to effectively verify hybrid systems. We identify a sufficient condition under which such a combination is more effective than random sampling. Furthermore, we analyze different strategies of combining random sampling and symbolic execution and propose an algorithm which allows us to dynamically switch between them so as to reduce the overall cost. Our method has been implemented as a web-based checker named …